Roundup: IBM’s new zEnterprise Mainframe

IBM employees James Geuke (top) and Larry Terpak (standing) install covers on the new IBM zEnterprise System mainframe. (Photo: Feature Photo Service for IBM)

Today IBM officially unveiled its zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design that allows workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualized system. The launch was widely discussed on the web, so we’ve put together a roundup of some of the relevant commentary and analysis:

• IBM Unveils Z Series, a New Generation of Mainframes – With the introduction of a new generation of mainframes, IBM is trying to tighten its grip on corporate and government data centers. The most significant change, analysts say, is that other kinds of computers can now be plugged into the mainframe to manage a data center almost as if it were a single computer. The new machines, some customers say, are the most significant change in mainframe design in a decade or more. From the New York Times.
• IBM Launches Massive New Mainframe Systems – IBM has attempted data-center-wide management before, but not at this level. The software used to manage the systems is called Unified Resource Manager, which can manage more than 100,000 virtualized servers across the mainframe, System p and System x. From ServerWatch.
• IBM’s new mainframe, the zEnterprise 196, is a leviathan – Every new IBM mainframe says something about the times we live in, and today’s latest mainframe release is no different. The zEnterprise system, as it is now called, has become a cross-platform management system, a sovereign of other systems. From Patrick Thibodeau at ComputerWorld.
• IBM unveils hybrid mainframe, eyes data center consolidation – What’s the hubbub about? IBM is looking to bridge enterprises that run on mainframes with other industry standard servers. While hardware vendors take shots at each other, the reality is that most data centers have multiple hardware components. The key is to integrate those components, cut down on sprawl and save on energy. From Larry Dignan at ZDNet.
• IBM delivers meanest mainframe – the new hardware platform represents the culmination of a $1.5bn research and development project, which is part of a wider $5bn five year programme involving close collaboration across IBM’s software and hardware divisions. From ComputerWeekly.
• IBM’s New Mainframes Take On Dell, HP – The days when IBM’s mainframe computers held a monopoly on enterprise computing may have ended with the influx of cheaper x86 and Unix servers. But Big Blue is still reinventing its big iron. And now it’s teaching it how to play nicely with those more modern platforms. From Forbes.com
• Another Mainframe, Another Debate Over Mainframes – IBM is out with a new mainframe this week, which naturally led to claims that it is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the final death gasp of a technology giving way to commodity systems. From IT Business Edge.

Roundup: IBM, Interxion, Brocade

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• IBM involved in ‘Dispicable Me’ movie production.  IBM announced that it has collaborated with Illumination Entertainment to help it meet the massive production requirements involved in creating its new computer-animated 3-D feature film, ‘”Despicable Me.”  The animation process for the movie  generated 142 terabytes of data. “Thanks to the capacity of IBM’s rendering technology and the skills of our artists, we were able to bring our creative vision to life through the completion of a wonderfully entertaining film and build the foundation for a large pipeline of projects in development,” said Chris Meledandri, Producer of “Despicable Me” and founder of Illumination Entertainment. To meet the intense computing requirements of the film Illumination Entertainment tapped IBM and its Paris-based Business Partner Serviware to build a server farm based on IBM’s iDataPlex system. “Despicable Me” is being release by Universal Studios on July 9th.
• Interxion recognized in Europe.  Interxion announced that its Technology and Engineering Group has been recognized for their “Outstanding Contribution to the Data Centre Sector” at the sixth annual Data Centre Europe Awards ceremony held at Espaces Antipolis in Nice, France.  The award was presented to Interxion’s Vice President of Technology and Engineering, Lex Coors and honors the recipient for the group’s service quality, management excellence and technical achievement within the European data center market. Kevin Dean, Chief Marketing Officer at Interxion, commented, “this is a fantastic honour for our Technology & Engineering Group, which have been responsible for the design, build and upgrade of nearly 55,000m2 of space in 27 data centres across 11 countries. Interxion’s Technology & Engineering Group have been instrumental in developing and applying best practice across the entire company footprint and promoting the adoption of these practices across the sector.”
• Brocade helps Bank of China build data center.  Brocade (BRCD) announced that Bank of China is utilizing Brocade host bus adapters (HBAs) to improve server connectivity within its data center.  Server connectivity and performance in the IT infrastructure will be improved by adding 200 Brocade 415 and 425 HBAs. “Maintaining high server availability to help ensure business continuity has become one of the primary challenges for the bank,” said a Bank of China spokesman. “With its hot-swappable SFPs, the Brocade HBAs can significantly improve server availability, simplify customer management, ensure continuity of banking services and help us provide customers with 24×7 access to service.”

Deal Roundup: IBM, Dell, HP, Google, Amazon

It was a busy week for technology mergers and acquisitions. Here’s a recap of the deals announced this week:

• IBM to acquire BigFix.  IBM announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire BigFix, Inc., a privately-held company based in Emeryville, California.  The acquisition will extend security and compliance in the enterprise for IBM to provide updates globally to thousands of laptops, PCs and servers in the data center. “BigFix automates some of the most time-intensive IT tasks across the most complex global networks, helping save organizations significant amounts of time, labor, and expense,” said Al Zollar, general manager, IBM Tivoli software. “BigFix’s real-time visibility and control for globally distributed computing devices will complement IBM’s existing smarter data center offerings and strengthen our ability to build security into the fabric of the enterprise.”  In a single view BigFix software can manage security configuration and vulnerability management, real-time reporting of compliance status and new software deployments, and power consumption management. BigFix will be integrated into IBM Software Group and the deal is expected to close the the third quarter of 2010.
• Dell to acquire Scalent.  Dell announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Scalent, a private company that provides software that makes data center infrastructure dynamic, easily scalable and highly efficient.  “Scalent provides a critical building block for our Virtual Integrated System, the most open, capable and affordable converged infrastructure solution available,” said Brad Anderson, Dell senior vice president, Enterprise Product Group.  In 2009 Scalent received Patent No. 7,574,491for “a system and method for implementing a virtual data center.” Dell will integrate Scalent technology into its Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) solution. The acquisition is expected to be completed in their second fiscal quarter.
• Google acquires ITA.  Google announced they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire ITA Software, a flight information software company for $700 million in cash.  The deal will allow Google to pursue the creation of new flight search tools that will enable users to find better flight information more easily on the Internet.
• Amazon acquires Woot.  Amazon has signed an agreement to acquire Woot!, an online retailer whose main website has a single discounted product each day.  Although the acquisition price was not disclosed, TechCrunch reports that Amazon paid $110 million in cash.  In typical Woot! fashion, their CEO explains the acquisition, and the employees respond with a rapping monkey puppet video on their blog.
• HP announced it has completed it’s acquisition of Palm Inc. at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash. Under HP, Palm will be responsible for webOS software development and webOS based hardware products.

Top 500 Highlights Supercomputing Trends

The 25th annual International Supercomputing Conference opened Monday with a record 1,797 attendees.  Held in Hamburg Germany the conference for high performance computing systems was represented by 50 countries and 151 exhibitors this year.

China’s Nebulae
The Top 500 list was released Monday morning and the top ten had some changes.  Most notable was China’s move to number two on the list with the Nebulae supercomputer, with a sustained computing speed of 1.271 Peta FLOPS (1 PetaFLOP is 10¹⁵ Floating point Operations Per Second). This is the first time Nebulae has been listed on the Top500.  Housed in the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) the Nebulae is a Dawning TC3600 blade system with Intel X5650 processors and a Nvida Tesla C2050 GPU. With120,640 cores the supercomputer tops #1 Jaguar with a theoretical performance of 2.98 petaFLOPS.

Infiniband
According to a Top500 sub-list for June 2010 there are 207 supercomputers utilizing Infiband. Data center connectivity solution provider Mellanox (MLNX) claimed Tuesday that adoption of its InfiniBand-connected CPU cores has grown 73 percent, representing more than 41 percent of the TOP500 list. “Advancements in multicore CPU architectures and the rise in GPU computing are placing greater demands on server and storage interconnects for higher bandwidth and lower application latencies,” said Jie Wu, Research Director, Technical Computing at IDC.  Mellanox 40Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity products, including ConnectX-2 adapters and IS5600 switches with FabricIT fabric management software, provided the high-performance server and storage networking for the #2 Nebulae supercomputer.

On Tuesday Voltaire (VOLT) and Platform Computing announced a partnership to deliver optimized and automated management of data center resources, in virtualized and cloud computing environments. “Combining the intelligence of Voltaire’s UFM software with the dynamic provisioning capabilities of Platform LSF, enables customers to fully automate network configuration management and optimize the network. This meets the heavy needs of HPC data centers and cloud computing environments that may be running tens to hundreds of applications,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing at Voltaire.

Some other interesting highlights of the June 2010 Top500 list include:

• The entry level to the list moved up to the 24.7 teraFLOPS mark.
• Quad-core processor systems have saturated the list with 425 systems using them.
• The U.S. is the leading consumer of high performance computing systems with 282 of the 500, with Europe having 144 systems.

The Cray Jaguar supercomputer, owned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee held on to the number one position with 1.75 petaFLOPS. Jaguar is a Cray XT5-HE with AMD Opteron six core 2.6 GHz processors. Those 224,162 cores reached a theoretical peak of 2.3 petaFLOPS. The Register has some additional information about the number one and two spots:

” Jaguar takes just under 4 watts to deliver a megaflops at a cost of $114 per megaflops for the iron, while Nebulae consumes 2 watts per megaflops at a cost of $39 per megaflops for the system.”

The BBC also reports on the supercomputers and shows how long it takes the average PC to match the performance of 1,750 trillion calculations per second.

The 500 fastest supercomputers listed on the June 2010 list combined are 32.4 petaFLOPS of computing power. The International Supercomputing Conference will run through June 3. InsideHPC has extensive coverage of the conference and has been reporting on a number of items coming from it. The conference web site also has video blogs and some live streaming.

Roundup: Gartner, IBM, AT&T, Level 3

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Gartner Finds Growth in Server Shipments. Gartner reported Tuesday that worldwide server shipments grew 23 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2010, while revenue increased 6 percent. The growth rate has not matched 2008 levels yet, but the U.S. accounted for the most significant growth with a 28.6 percent increase in shipments.  “Emerging regions that were expected to grow, such as Asia/Pacific, forged ahead, while some mature markets, such as the U.S., produced better-than-expected results, as other countries and regions had a ‘mixed bag’ of results,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner.  HP took the lead over IBM in the worldwide server market with server revenue reaching $3.4 billion, up 2.7 percent over last year.

IBM acquires AT&T unit. IBM and AT&T announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Sterling Commerce from AT&T for approximately $1.4 billion in cash.  Sterling Commerce offerings power over 18,000 global customers in financial services, retail, manufacturing, communications and distribution industries.  “The combination of IBM’s products, services and skills with the Sterling Commerce B2B integration and cross-channel capabilities resulting from this acquisition is unparalleled,” said Bob Irwin, CEO of Sterling Commerce.  The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2010, subject to regulatory approvals and closing conditions.

Level 3 selected by EtherSpeak. Level 3 (LVLT) announced that it has been selected to provide wholesale voice, toll-free and VoIP enhanced local services for EtherSpeak Communications, an open standard based IP communications solutions provider. EtherSpeak will be able to expand their coverage area and streamline their business by operating voice traffic on Level 3’s network. ”Our goal at EtherSpeak is to provide our customers with a range of highly reliable IP services including voice, fax and video, and so the quality of the network to which those services are connected is of paramount importance to us,” said Neil Darling, president of EtherSpeak Communications. “We turned to Level 3 because the company’s reliable and scalable all-IP network is a natural fit for the value we work every day to deliver to the benefit of our resellers and their customers.”

Roundup: NTT America, Infoblox, Akamai, IBM

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

NTT America Enterprise cloud solution.  NTT America announced that it will offer an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant public cloud solution to its customers in the U.S. market. NTT America’s cloud will leverage OpSource’s cloud capabilities, the NTT Communications’ Global IP Network and its own data center infrastructure.  ”By pairing OpSource Cloud’s technology with NTT America’s secure data center infrastructure, companies can take advantage of a solution that is not only powerful and completely reliable but scalable, removing any remaining barriers to enterprises adopting cloud computing today,” said Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource.  Services are available in either pre-paid plans or month-to-month, pay as you go basis with no annual commitment.

Infoblox acquires Netcordia. Network infrastructure management provider Infoblox announced that it has acquired Netcordia for an undisclosed price. Products from the two companies complement each other as Infoblox handles hardware to handle tasks such as processing internet addresses, and Netcordia does network change and configuration management software. Robert Thomas, President and CEO of Infoblox, said that “Netcordia’s market momentum, customer base, technology and exceptional employees, coupled with Infoblox’s team and unique real-time data distribution and management expertise, will be invaluable to positioning Infoblox for continued success as a leading provider of both DDI and NCCM solutions.”

Akamai and IBM team for web applications delivery. Akamai (AKAM) announced a multi-phase collaboration with IBM to enable optimal technology configurations and integrations between Akamai’s Web application acceleration services and IBM’s WebSphere software. Pre-set configurations of IBM’s WebSphere DataPower Appliance are available today and with Akamai’s Web Application Accelerator service have shown ground breaking performance for delivering rich web applications to users all over the globe.  ”We continue to optimize selected WebSphere products to integrate with Akamai’s Web acceleration services, which gives our customers the ability to elastically scale application deployments without associated capital build out enabling them to react more rapidly to business opportunities and changes,” said Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow, Vice President and CTO, WebSphere. Akamai will be presenting sessions and showcasing a live display of its Network Operations Command Center (NOCC) during the IBM Impact 2010 event taking place in Las Vegas May 3-5. The tour of Akamai’s NOCC by Dr. Tom Leighton is a very interesting look into Akamai and the traffic they carry on the Internet.

IBM Buys Cloud Broker Cast Iron Systems

IBM has acquired Cast Iron Systems, a cloud integrator focused on helping enterprise customers adopt cloud computing technologies, the companies said today. The deal highlights the growing niche for companies that serve as “cloud brokers” that serve as guides for companies seeking to make the most of the emerging cloud delivery model. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“The integration challenges Cast Iron Systems is tackling are crucial to clients who are looking to adopt alternative delivery models to manage their businesses,” said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM WebSphere. “The combination of IBM and Cast Iron Systems will make it easy for clients to integrate business applications, no matter where those applications reside.”

Earnings Roundup: VMware, IBM, Yahoo

Here’s a roundup of quarterly financial results announcements:

VMware reports first quarter results. VMware (VMW) announced financial results Tuesday for the first quarter of 2010.  Revenues were $634 million for the first quarter,with the U.S. portion jumping 30% from last year up to $317 million.  International revenues grew 40 percent to $317 million from the first quarter of 2009.  “Our strong first quarter results were driven by pent up customer demand, carried over from last quarter, as well as a strong performance in Europe, China and Japan,” said Mark Peek, chief financial officer. Earlier in the year VMware acquired email and collaboration vendor Zimbra from Yahoo. Other highlights included acquiring parts of EMC’s Ionix IT management business and a partnership with Cisco and NetApp to provide a secure multi-tenancy design architecture designed to enhance security in cloud environments.

IBM reports first quarter results. IBM announced first quarter 2010 results Monday.  Revenue was reported at $22.9 billion, net income at $2.6 billion and full year 2010 earnings-per-share expectations raised to at least $11.20.  “In the first quarter, we drove significantly improved revenue growth rates from the fourth quarter across our businesses and geographies. We had strong results in strategic investment areas including growth markets, business analytics and Smarter Planet solutions,” said Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Revenues for Global Services increased 4 percent and both Application Management signings and signings in Transactional services decreased.  With first quarter cash on hand at $14 billion and a strong balance sheet, the company is well positioned to support its full-year objectives.

Yahoo reports first quarter results. Yahoo (YHOO) announced first quarter 2010 results Tuesday for the quarter ending March 31, 2010.  Highlighting a twenty percent year over year growth in display advertising Yahoo reported $1,597 million in revenues and $188 million.  “Our operating income growth and expanded margins this quarter demonstrate the success of our efficiency efforts as well as the first tangible benefits of our search agreement with Microsoft,” said Yahoo! Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse.  Yahoo! received clearance for the search agreement with Microsoft from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission and the companies commenced implementation of the agreement on February 23, 2010.  Data center news in the first quarter included Yahoo opening its Nebraska facility and the installation of generators at the Lockport New York facility.

Roundup: New Intel Xeon 5600 Processors

Boyd Davis, director of marketing Of Intel's Data Center Group, holds up an Intel Xeon 5600 processor

On Tuesday Intel (INTC) launched the Xeon 5600 series processor, blending security, performance and energy efficiency that the company says can significantly improve the economics of data center operations. Intel says one 5600 processor can replace 15 single-core servers, deliver 60 percent better performance than the Xeon 5500 and achieve a return on investment in as little as five months.

The introduction of the 5600 marks the next step in the transition to the Intel 32-nanometer processors, formerly code-named Westmere. The 32nm logic technology uses Intel’s second generation high-k metal gate transistors to increase speed and decrease energy consumption. Processors within the Xeon 5600 family range from a four core L5609 at 1.8GHz all the way up to a six core X5680 running a 3.33GHz.  All chips have 12MB of L3 cache regardless of core count.

“The performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series is so compelling that it’s absolutely justifiable immediately in terms of ROI, to simply replace Legacy service, a whole rack of servers, or whatever it happens to be with a single platform,” said Simon Crosby, CTO, Data Center & Cloud, Citrix Systems said. “We did it ourselves for our own IT workloads and reduced 264 servers to 16 and in the process got high availability and agility as a result.”